My favorite librarian brings home small treasures found in forgotten stacks, in donation bins, in dusty archives. Paper flowers. Discarded albums. Origami vases. Antebellum romance novels. We hold them in our hands, stand them on coffee tables, pin them to refrigerators, mail them sealed in envelopes. He collects them, one by one, living room filled with overlooked objects, with things someone else stopped seeing over time until they faded.
My favorite librarian works academics by day, brings pop-up books home. Together we curl into couch cushions, watch dinosaurs parade across paper, and he reads the words aloud while I pull strips and levers to make triceratops move. He watches the tabbed mechanisms, to know how they fold and bend inside the book. When we flip the page to T-Rex, he lowers his voice an octave.
My favorite librarian brings apples and carrots in a plastic container for lunch. He eats them at the reference desk, quick bites between questions. He helps a sophomore research fairy tales for English, shows a freshman how databases work. They remember his name, request him even when he’s away from the reference desk, eating the same apples and carrots in the quiet space of his office. He sets the slices down. He helps them every time.
My favorite librarian climbs trees when we hike, balances high arches upon fallen logs, sidles his way in steady shuffle, arms extended, one ravine edge to another. He unearths sturdy branches from a forest floor of dry leaves, hands me walking sticks to help on hills. He peels back the bark, teeming underbelly exposed, then pats the wood gently back in place, tucks termites to sleep. As we sit on a rock face, watching a motionless deer watch us, he tells me there is calm, a stillness everywhere, and we both watch until the deer darts away, antlers evaporating over the hill, through trees.
My favorite librarian screams, just once as we are walking along the sidewalk, reaches his arm in front of my chest. We stop, and I think danger – rogue vehicle, runaway bicycle – but then he points, a brown caterpillar moseying across the concrete, and we divert our path, we mind our shoes, sidestepping the steady movement of progress.
My favorite librarian brings home small treasures found in forgotten stacks, in donation bins, in dusty archives. Paper flowers. Discarded albums. Origami vases. Antebellum romance novels. We hold them in our hands, stand them on coffee tables, pin them to refrigerators, mail them sealed in envelopes. He collects them, one by one, living room filled with overlooked objects, with things someone else stopped seeing over time until they faded.
My favorite librarian fills his home with sound as well, sometimes speakers, often headphones. He turns off the lights and closes his eyes, encases the small bones of his ears inside soft padding, lets the bones melt on the fluid hum of waves, a stillness sanctified inside some reverberating core. Sometimes, when I catch him with headphones on, sitting quiet in the dark, he pulls the cord and the sound explodes, rebounds from the echoing walls of the room, so I can hear too. Sometimes, then, we dance.
My favorite librarian has his faults, as all librarians, all people do. He sleeps late, mostly Saturdays, no matter how much poking, how much coughing, how many accidental digs prod his ribs. All that time, when we could be outside, the sun already full bloom, but he just rolls over, curls himself into blankets, sleeps some more. Too many reference questions, it must be, so perhaps this can pass. Even the best of librarians need to recharge.
Sometimes, when he at last wakes up, my favorite librarian draws flying rabbits or talking cats, etched in careful graphite strokes. He sees on the page, and in the stacks and in dust bins, all the possibilities of what could be, all the items unnoticed, all the bright shining pinwheels that spin and whirl inside our armored, turtle shell hearts.
Anne Valente's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Monkeybicycle, PANK, Keyhole 8, Necessary Fiction, JMWW and You Must Be This Tall To Ride, among others. She is the assistant editor of Storyglossia and lives in Ohio, where her fiance Josh works as the best librarian of all time.
